Tag: technology

In the few days since President Trump nominated him to be an Associate Justice on the Supreme Court, Judge Brett Kavanaugh has seen his life put under the microscope. It turns out that the U.S Court of Appeals for the D.C Circuit judge really likes baseball, volunteers to help the homeless, and has strong connections to the Republican Party – especially the George W. Bush administration. More consequentially, Kavanaugh is an influential judge with solid conservative credentials. For libertarians, Kavanaugh’s record includes much to applaud, especially when it comes to reining in the power of regulatory authorities. However, at least one of Kavanaugh’s concurrences reveals arguments that should concern those who value civil liberties. Members of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary should press Kavanaugh on these arguments at his upcoming confirmation hearing.

In 2015, Kavanaugh wrote a solo concurrence in the denial of rehearing en banc in Klayman v. Obama (full opinion below), in which the plaintiffs challenged the constitutionality of the National Security Agency’s (NSA) bulk telephony metadata program. According to Kavanaugh, this program was “entirely consistent” with the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures.

The opening of the concurrence is ordinary enough, with Kavanaugh mentioning that the NSA’s program is consistent with the Third Party Doctrine. According to this doctrine, people don’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy in information they volunteer to third parties, such as phone companies and banks. This allows law enforcement to access details about your communications and your credit card purchases without search warrants. My colleagues have been critical of the Third Party doctrine, filing an amicus brief taking aim at the doctrine in the recently decided Fourth Amendment case Carpenter v. United States.

Because the Third Party Doctrine remains binding precedent, Kavanaugh argues, the government’s collection of telephony metadata is not a Fourth Amendment search. Regardless of one’s opinion of the Third Party Doctrine, this is a reasonable interpretation of Supreme Court precedent from an appellate judge.

Yet in the next paragraph the concurrence takes an odd turn. Kavanaugh argues that even if the government’s collection of millions of Americans’ telephony metadata did constitute a search it would nonetheless not run afoul of the Fourth Amendment:

Even if the bulk collection of telephony metadata constitutes a search,[…] the Fourth Amendment does not bar all searches and seizures. It bars only unreasonable searches and seizures. And the Government’s metadata collection program readily qualifies as reasonable under the Supreme Court’s case law. The Fourth Amendment allows governmental searches and seizures without individualized suspicion when the Government demonstrates a sufficient “special need” – that is, a need beyond the normal need for law enforcement – that outweighs the intrusion on individual liberty. Examples include drug testing of students, roadblocks to detect drunk drivers, border checkpoints, and security screening at airports. […] The Government’s program for bulk collection of telephony metadata serves a critically important special need – preventing terrorist attacks on the United States. See THE 9/11 COMMISSION REPORT (2004). In my view, that critical national security need outweighs the impact on privacy occasioned by this program. The Government’s program does not capture the content of communications, but rather the time and duration of calls, and the numbers called. In short, the Government’s program fits comfortably within the Supreme Court precedents applying the special needs doctrine.

This paragraph includes a few points worth unpacking: 1) That the collection of telephony metadata is permitted under the “Special Needs” Doctrine, and 2) The 9/11 Commission Report buttresses the claim that “The Government’s program for bulk collection of telephony metadata serves a critically important special need – preventing terrorist attacks on the United States.”

It’s summertime and across the United States, children are away from school. The custom of long breaks in the school year dates to when most Americans worked in agriculture and often needed their children’s help on the farm. Of course, most children simply didn’t attend school, instead helping with housework and grueling farm labor year-round. In 1820, for example, primary school enrollment in the United States was just over 40 percent. That percentage rapidly shot upward in the coming decades, reaching 100 percent by 1870. But even then, many children didn’t make it past elementary school. In 1870, U.S. mean years of schooling stood at just 4.28. That number has risen steadily ever since. What changed? Technology, for one thing.

In his book Enlightenment Now, Harvard University professor Steven Pinker recounts how technology helped get boys off the farm and into the classroom. He quotes a tractor advertisement from 1921:

“By investing in a Case Tractor and Ground Detour Plow and Harrow outfit now, your boy can get his schooling without interruption, and the Spring work will not suffer by his absence. Keep the boy in school—and let a Case Kerosene Tractor take his place in the field. You’ll never regret either investment.”

As more farms adopted efficiency-enhancing agricultural devices like kerosene tractors, more boys attended school instead of working the fields. For girls, the huge time savings brought on by labor-saving household devices played a similar role. As running water, electricity, washing machines, and other modern conveniences spread, time spent on housework plummeted. Pinker’s book also contains a telling chart documenting the change.

Last week the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Carpenter v. United States, with a five-member majority holding that the government’s collection of at least seven days-worth of cell site location information (CSLI) is a Fourth Amendment search. The American Civil Liberties Union’s Nathan Wessler and the rest of Carpenter’s team deserve congratulations; the ruling is a win for privacy advocates and reins in a widely used surveillance method. But while the ruling is welcome it remains narrow, leaving law enforcement with many tools that can be used to uncover intimate details about people’s private lives without a warrant, including persistent aerial surveillance, license plate readers, and facial recognition.

Background

Timothy Carpenter and others were involved in a string of armed robberies of cell phone stores in Michigan and Ohio in 2010 and 2011. Police arrested four suspects in 2011. One of these suspects identified 15 accomplices and handed over some of their cell phone numbers to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Carpenter was one of these accomplices.

Prosecutors sought Carpenter’s cell phone records pursuant to the Stored Communications Act. They did not need to demonstrate probable cause (the standard required for a search warrant). Rather, they merely had to demonstrate to judges that they had “specific and articulable facts showing that there are reasonable grounds to believe” that the data they sough were “relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation.”

Carpenter’s two wireless carriers, MetroPCS and Sprint, complied with the judges’ orders, producing 12,898 location points over 127 days. Using this information prosecutors were able to charge Carpenter with a number of federal offenses related to the armed robberies.

Various news outlets are reporting that, at midnight tonight, special U.S. tariffs on imports of steel and aluminum from Canada, Mexico, and the European Union will go into effect. This action stems (incongruously and capriciously) from two nearly yearlong investigations conducted by the U.S. Department of Commerce under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, which found that imports of steel and aluminum “threaten to impair the national security” of the United States. This seldom used statute gives the president broad discretion both to define what constitutes a national security threat and to prescribe a course to mitigate the threat. On both counts, President Trump has abused that discretion.

In March, the president announced his intention to impose duties of 25 percent on steel imports and 10 percent on aluminum imports from all countries. But temporary exemptions were granted to some countries in an effort to extort commitments from them to do their part to reduce the U.S. trade deficit (by selling us less stuff and buying from us more stuff) or to agree to U.S. demands in ongoing trade negotiations (South Korea, Canada, Mexico). The Koreans succeeded by agreeing to limits on their steel exports and by upping the percentage of US-made automobiles that can be sold in Korea without meeting all of the local environmental standards. Ah, free trade…

Apparently, the Europeans, Canadians, and Mexicans haven’t bent sufficiently to Trump’s will, therefore those countries—those steadfast allies—constitute threats to U.S. national security and will no longer be exempt from the tariffs, which means that U.S. industries that rely on steel and aluminum (imported or domestic) will be hit with substantial taxes to mitigate that threat. Got it?

This announcement comes on the heels of one made earlier this week regarding the “trade war” with China, which is back on 10 days after Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin declared it to be “put on hold.” (I guess it was just a rain delay.) On June 15, the administration will publish the final list of Chinese products—about 1,300 products valued at about $50 billion—that will be hit with 25 percent duties. The Chinese government has published its own list of U.S. exports that will be hit with retaliatory duties in China.

So, as has been the case every day for the past 16+ months, the U.S. and global economies (even as they’ve strengthened) remain exposed to the whims of an unorthodox president who precariously steers policy from one extreme to the other, keeping us in a perpetual state of uncertainty. With the Europeans, Canadians, Mexicans, and Chinese all preparing to retaliate in response to these precipitous U.S. actions, at the stroke of midnight we may finally get the certainty of the beginning of a deleterious trade war.

Reactions in the United States to the Trump administration’s announcement on Saturday that it would refrain from imposing new tariffs on imports from China for the time being have been decidedly negative. One would expect criticism from the unions, the steel producers, and old economy manufacturing trade associations. After all, many seemed not the least bit concerned about burdening the economy with 25 percent duties on $50-$150 billion of Chinese imports and retaliation of similar scale against U.S. exports, as long as they secured for themselves a small bag of booty in the process. Trump’s “America-First” brand of economic nationalism was everything they had ever hoped for—and now it may be in retreat.

Likewise, one can understand why the administration’s decision to reconsider its approach to Chinese technology companies and Chinese technology transgressions makes the security hawks unhappy. Many of them have been peddling a self-perpetuating narrative that is one part fact to three parts innuendo, hearsay, and speculation that war (and not just the trade kind) between the United States and China is inevitable, and that there is very little scope for further cooperation. Why, they wonder, would Trump squander the leverage to compel real Chinese reform that was afforded by the results of the Section 301 investigation and ZTE’s existential predicament?

But I am most disappointed by those who present themselves as pro-trade, internationalist, cosmopolitan, and informed, but who seem strangely disappointed that the administration stepped back from the abyss. There was a point when these folks warned about the perils of Trump’s protectionist path, and screamed from the hilltops about how Trump’s unilateralism would kill the World Trade Organization. On Twitter, they goad Trump: “Trump blinked.” “Xi schooled Trump.” “U.S. credibility has been squandered” (as if it was somehow squandered THAT moment). For some of these people, disdain for Trump or the desire to be perceived as the most offended by his behavior is more important than supporting one of his rare decisions to do the right thing.

During his presidential campaign Donald Trump proposed the “extreme vetting” of immigrants. Civil libertarians criticized the proposal, not least because the Extreme Vetting Initiative mandated by one of President Trump’s first executive orders sought technology that would use machine learning to determine whether visa applicants would be likely to contribute to society and the national interest. Fortunately, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) – is no longer pursuing this vetting technology.

In January 2017 President Trump issued Executive Order 13769, which stated in part (emphasis mine):

Sec. 4. Implementing Uniform Screening Standards for All Immigration Programs. (a) The Secretary of State, the Secretary of Homeland Security, the Director of National Intelligence, and the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation shall implement a program, as part of the adjudication process for immigration benefits, to identify individuals seeking to enter the United States on a fraudulent basis with the intent to cause harm, or who are at risk of causing harm subsequent to their admission. This program will include the development of a uniform screening standard and procedure, such as […] a process to evaluate the applicant’s likelihood of becoming a positively contributing member of society and the applicant’s ability to make contributions to the national interest; and a mechanism to assess whether or not the applicant has the intent to commit criminal or terrorist acts after entering the United States.

The Extreme Vetting Initiative tasked with implementing (among things) this feature of Trump’s executive order, included the following in its statement of objectives:

ICE must develop processes that determine and evaluate an applicant’s probability of becoming a positively contributing member of society as well as their ability to contribute to national interests in order to meet the EOs outlined by the President.

A background document on the initiative outlined requirements, including the exploitation of publicly available information found on blogs, social media, academic websites, and other online sources. The same backgrounder went on to state that the goal was for the initiative to generate 10,000 investigatory leads each year.

Earlier this year dozens of computer scientists, mathematicians, and engineers wrote a letter to then-Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Elaine Duke, outlining the numerous issued associated with the Extreme Vetting Initiative. As I noted in November last year, the letter highlighted that ICE’s proposal would likely be discriminatory as well as unreliable. From the letter:

According to its Statement of Objectives, the Extreme Vetting Initiative seeks to make “determinations via automation” about whether an individual will become a “positively contributing member of society” and will “contribute to the national interests.” As far as we are aware, neither the federal government nor anyone else has defined, much less attempted to quantify, these characteristics. Algorithms designed to predict these undefined qualities could be used to arbitrarily flag groups of immigrants under a veneer of objectivity.

Inevitably, because these characteristics are difficult (if not impossible) to define and measure, any algorithm will depend on “proxies” that are more easily observed and may bear little or no relationship to the characteristics of interest. For example, developers could stipulate that a Facebook post criticizing U.S. foreign policy would identify a visa applicant as a threat to national interests. They could also treat income as a proxy for a person’s contributions to society, despite the fact that financial compensation fails to adequately capture people’s roles in their communities or the economy.

For more information on the Extreme Vetting Initiative, including original ICE documents, visit the Brennan Center for Justice’s resource page.

My colleague David Bier and I have written a policy brief on the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) flown by Customs and Border Protection (CBP). We argue that CBP’s fleet of Predator B drones are a threat to the privacy of Americans living along the border and an inefficient tool for locating illegal border crossers and illegal drugs. In addition, state and local use of these UAVs mean that American living in the interior are also at risk of being the target of warrantless surveillance.

Predator B drones may have a reputation as highly efficient military tools, but on the homefront they’ve proven inefficient at contributing to border security. For instance, in the last few years CBP’s predator drones have contributed to less than a percent of illegal border crosser apprehensions at a cost of $32,000 per arrest. When it comes to marijuana seizures, the drone fare little better, being responsible for about 3 percent of marijuana seizures in the same time period.

These inefficient UAVs pose a threat to Americans living along the border and in the interior. State and local law enforcement can request CBP drones for assistance. In fact, the first domestic law enforcement use of UAV to assist an arrest was in 2011, when police in North Dakota requested the use of a CBP Predator. Thanks to threeSupremeCourt cases from the 1980s warrantless aerial surveillance does not run afoul of the 4th Amendment. While some states have passed warrant requirements for UAVs, it’s not clear whether CBP adheres to state warrant requirements when acting on the behest of state and local law enforcement.